Invasion Rabaul

by Bruce Gamble

  The claim by the Japanese that they had been attacked was ludicrous. The prisoners were bound, and most of them had been roped together. Even more damning, the Japanese tried to erase the evidence by destroying the identification discs and other personal items they took from the victims, but their attempt was sloppy. They allowed several Australians to survive, for one thing, and many of the victims’ ID tags were later recovered.

  Initially, at least nine men survived the massacre. Bill Collins came out of hiding and found two Australians at Waitavalo suffering from bayonet wounds. They were unconscious, so he moved them into a shack and went to get help. But soon thereafter a Japanese warship entered Wide Bay and sent in a landing party, which found the two survivors. The Japanese dealt with them mercilessly, first smearing them with grease, then pouring flammable liquid onto the shack and setting it afire. Collins went into hiding again, and later met up with a group of civilian constables from Rabaul who were escaping down the coast.

  BILL COOK SPENT THAT FIRST NIGHT IN MISERY. TORMENTED BY INSECTS that swarmed around his wounds, he tried to concentrate on anything that would distract him from the horrors of the day. When the sun rose, he discovered that the fire he’d seen the previous evening was only thirty yards away. The camp was occupied by Joe Scanlan’s party, and within minutes Cook was receiving first aid and telling his gruesome story.

  Scanlan replaced Cook’s bloody shirt with one of his own, then sent Cook along with a native guide to find medical attention for his wounds. The islander, fearing the Japanese would kill him for aiding the enemy, promptly abandoned Cook on the track. Feeling helpless, Cook wandered on his own until he found another group of soldiers. “[One] can imagine my joy,” he later stated, “when I saw three Aussies walking along.”

  After Cook shared his tale with them, they decided to take a wide detour around Tol. The terrain proved too rugged, however, and eventually they ended up back where they started. The only way to get farther south was to walk directly through the plantation. “We had to pass the spot where the massacre had been committed,” Cook acknowledged, “and it took all my willpower to keep going. I carried a razor blade in my hand with the intention of committing suicide rather than be captured again. My mates could see my panic, and they kept me in the middle of the party.”

  As the foursome moved along the coastline, Cook’s friends gave him plenty of encouragement. They told him his wounds “were healing wonderfully,” but he wasn’t so sure. The left side of his badly swollen face was discharging quantities of pus, the odor of which was difficult for all of them to endure.

  Other parties of Australians passing through Tol discovered three more survivors of the massacre: Marshall, Webster, and Hazelgrove. Similarly, a trio of plantation owners found Alf Robinson wandering in the jungle, half out of his wits, his hands still tied behind his back. His physical appearance was hideous. Insects had tormented him for days, but he was helpless to ward them off. Now his face, arms, and legs were swollen from bites. Furthermore, his thumbs were black and grotesquely distended because of the fishing line that bound them tightly together. Once freed, he chose to remain alone, afraid of the reprisals that would befall any people who assisted him.

  Fortunately for the survivors, Ted Palmer, the chief medical officer of Lark Force, was encamped only a few miles south of Wide Bay near a Roman Catholic mission. Friends carefully helped Cook, Marshall, Webster, and Hazelgrove around the bay and placed them under Palmer’s care. Amazingly, despite their terrible wounds and the jungle’s unforgiving conditions, all made a gradual recovery.

  By February 7, a sizeable group of Australians had gathered near the mission, known as Kalai. John Mollard’s party arrived prior to the massacres, and the numbers grew as additional groups straggled in. Two small parties were led by Ben Dawson and Bill Owen, who had each experienced several adventures as they trekked across the Baining Mountains. Their friends welcomed the newcomers warmly, especially Dawson, whom everyone thought had been killed at Rabaul.

  Because of the recent atrocities, however, the general mood at Kalai remained somber. Scanlan was despondent when he arrived on February 8. John Gray, his traveling partner for much of the journey, had failed to return after conducting a recon of Tol on the morning of the massacre. A popular engineer, he had been among those captured and was taken by boat to Kokopo. Scanlan’s houseboy, Tovokina, was also gone. One of the civilians in the party had decided to surrender, and the young native accompanied him back to Rabaul.

  The news of the massacre was distressing enough, but the men gathered at Kalai were also troubled by the behavior of Father John Meierhofer, the local missionary. The biological brother of Alphons Meierhofer at Lemingi, he possessed none of his sibling’s generosity or patience. Father John stubbornly refused to assist the Australians camped near his church; therefore, they simply helped themselves, even butchering some of his livestock. No one was happy about the situation, and the Australians decided to move farther down the coast.

  Joe Scanlan did not accompany them. Defeated in battle, beaten by the jungle at every turn, he had finally reached the limit of his physical and emotional endurance. Blaming himself for the recent atrocities at Tol, he took seriously the latest warnings posted by the Japanese, and decided his only option was to surrender. On February 9 he announced his intention to go back to Rabaul. He was asked to speak to the assembled men that evening, but had nothing to say.

  Suddenly, John Mollard stepped forward and said he would accompany Scanlan. Everyone was stunned, but he explained his decision with “sheer hard logic,” at the same time urging the others to accompany him and Scanlan. Only a few troops decided to go, including Eric Angwin, who perhaps felt duty bound to the colonel. The rest were determined to keep moving south.

  The next morning, the men at Kalai were amazed by the transformation in Scanlan’s appearance. “There was the Commandant in a blaze of glory,” recalled Selby, “complete with summer-weight uniform, collar and tie, red gorgets, and red cap band. He was wearing new boots and had cut his hair and shaved his beard with a razor borrowed from the missionary. He certainly looked every inch a colonel, and the effect was a startling contrast to our ragged shorts and shirts, battered boots, and stubbly beards.”

  Scanlan was determined to look dignified for his last act as the commander of Lark Force. Accompanied by Mollard, Angwin, and two others, he left Kalai on February 10 and began the long walk back to Rabaul.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ESCAPE: THE LAKATOI

  “… after many adventures we arrived at Port Moresby.”

  —Sergeant Clive MacVean, 2/22nd Battalion

  The mass murders at Tol and Waitavalo plantations on February 4 represented a turning point. Prior to that Bloody Wednesday, no one from Lark Force had successfully gotten off New Britain, which seemed to validate Major General Horii’s warning that they could “find neither food nor way of escape.” (About twenty troops had been airlifted with 24 Squadron two weeks earlier, but that was technically an evacuation, not an escape.) In the wake of the massacres, however, some 385 soldiers and sixty civilians escaped to Port Moresby or the Australian mainland over a period of ten weeks. They were the lucky ones. The accounts of their courage, ingenuity, and perseverance not only gave the Commonwealth something to cheer about, but rank among the most compelling escape stories of the entire war.

  The dark side of their story is that they endured long weeks or even months of the harshest conditions imaginable before they reached safety. During that time, an estimated sixty-five evaders died from starvation or disease—more than were killed during the invasion itself. Most of those deaths could have been prevented with timely assistance from Canberra, but none came. No Australian warships were sent to rescue the remnants of Lark Force, no flying boats returned to pick up stragglers. The War Cabinet, aware for weeks that the troops were on the run, did nothing to help them.

  In the absence of official support, a handful of individuals took charge of various rescue effort
s. Some were soldiers, others lived on New Britain, and a few belonged to the Australia-New Guinea Administration Unit (ANGAU), which oversaw coastwatching operations.

  One of the first to take action was Lieutenant Commander Feldt, stationed at Townsville. Soon after Lark Force went off the air, he contacted John K. “Keith” McCarthy, a coastwatcher at Talasea on New Britain’s north shore, and asked him to transport a radio to Toma. McCarthy was to report on the situation at Rabaul, then coordinate an evacuation if possible. The mission would be long and hazardous, but Feldt believed the thirty-seven-year-old McCarthy had just the right stuff.

  I knew he was the appropriate man for the job. A tall, red-headed man of Irish descent, he was no cool, premeditating type. His affections and emotions governed him, but when his fine, free carelessness landed him in trouble, he could extricate himself, logic guiding his Celtic fervor until the danger was past. He had shown this capacity when ambushed in the heart of New Guinea by natives, coming safely out although wounded by three arrows, one of which he described as having ruined the beautiful symmetry of his navel. I could only hope that his long practice of improvising ways of escape from diverse and unorthodox difficulties had fitted him for coping with what lay ahead.

  Accompanied by plantation owner George H. S. “Rod” Marsland (also a member of ANGAU) and sixteen native police boys to carry the AWA 3B radio, McCarthy left Talasea in the 36-foot launch Aussi and motored northward for nearly two hundred miles along New Britain’s coastline. When he reached Open Bay, he learned that the Japanese occupied Pondo, one of the largest plantations on the northern shore. McCarthy directed Marsland to reconnoiter the coast on foot while he hid the Aussi a few miles up the Toriu River and established a base camp. He and the porters then began hauling the radio overland in the direction of Rabaul, but within days they encountered a steady stream of natives walking in the opposite direction. From them, McCarthy learned that Rabaul had fallen. The first part of his mission was therefore scrubbed, so he backtracked to the camp on the river.

  Marsland walked as far as Pondo, which was no longer occupied, though its boats had been destroyed or disabled. There he found Captain Alan G. Cameron and nine troops from C Company, all in relatively good shape, and they followed him back to the Toriu River camp. They joined up with McCarthy on February 11, whereupon Cameron explained that nearly four hundred Australians under Captain Appel were gathered farther north along the coast.

  This gave McCarthy something to work on. The base camp was moved up to Pondo, and by noon on February 14 the radio was ready for operation. Cameron transmitted the details of the Japanese invasion to Port Moresby, providing the first information received since Peter Figgis’s cryptic message three weeks earlier. Cameron also claimed that he had important information to bring out, and indicated that he would attempt to reach New Guinea by boat. However, the headquarters staff at Port Moresby told him that McCarthy was in charge of the evacuation attempt, and was therefore the approving authority.

  A battle of wills began immediately. McCarthy, who needed every available boat to evacuate Appel and his men, directed Cameron to set up staging sites at Talasea. But Cameron evidently resented taking orders from a civilian, even if he was an ANGAU officer, and ignored McCarthy’s directive. Instead, he left New Britain on February 20 in the motor launch Dulcy, taking his troops with him, and landed on the coast of New Guinea. Feldt later called the action “ill-judged,” but stopped short of accusing Cameron of dereliction or cowardice. “There was no lack of courage in this officer,” he stated, “as both his earlier and later career proved.”

  However, Cameron’s hasty departure was unnecessary. By the time his party docked at Salamaua, New Guinea, on March 3, other members of Lark Force had already reached Port Moresby, thus negating his justification for taking a vital boat away from McCarthy. Captain William G. Botham, the officer-in-charge of the Royal Australian Engineers at Rabaul, had led a small party on a fast trip down the south coast of New Britain. They had covered much of the distance in boats “borrowed” from missionaries, thereby getting beyond Tol prior to the massacres. Another party led by Captain Harold W. Nicholls of the NGA headquarters staff had done the same. The two groups sailed independently to the Trobriand Islands: Nicholls’ party of nine aboard the launch Goodava, and Captain Botham’s twelve men aboard the 20-foot-long Maria, her white hull hastily covered with black paint for camouflage. Both parties were airlifted to Port Moresby on March 1. Unfortunately, none of the escapees knew the whereabouts of the other scattered parties on New Britain; therefore, the authorities in New Guinea failed to convey to the War Cabinet the urgency of Lark Force’s situation.

  ON THE NORTHERN COAST OF NEW BRITAIN, PARTICULARLY AROUND Ataliklikun Bay, the South Seas Detachment played a waiting game. Instead of pushing into the jungle to flush out the Australian evaders, they set up outposts on the main trails that crisscrossed the Gazelle Peninsula, forming an effective cordon. The pickets snagged Australian prisoners almost daily. Many, like Bert Morgan and his malaria patient, simply surrendered at the first outpost they came to.

  The Japanese officer in charge of the Keravat River outpost, an individual of unknown rank named Ayara Ogama, sent several messages to the Australians hiding in his sector. Native runners delivered the first message to Pip Appel on February 7.

  To officer in charge of Australian soldiers: You are herewith commanded to surrender all soldiers with you. Food stuffs have been left at Vunarima and at [Mandres Sawmill] to help you make your way towards Rabaul. Your lives will be spared. If you do not surrender you will all be killed.

  Unaware of the massacres at Tol and Waitavalo, Appel ignored the message. Three days later Ogama tried a softer approach:

  Do not be afraid to be killed by us. Lots of your friends have surrendered to us. You cannot escape from this island and you will all die of starvation. You will be treated as prisoners of war and only do enough work to keep your health. We will give you two days to surrender.

  Once again there was no reply from the Australians, so Ogama included detailed instructions in his third note, delivered to Appel on February 14.

  [All] sick Australian Soldiers and all other Australians who are at Mr. Harvey’s bungalow tonight or early tomorrow morning are herewith commanded to be on the beach at Lassul at about 12 noon tomorrow. Put out a white flag and signal the ship to come in and pick you up. If no signal, ship will pass and leave you to walk back to [Vunakanau].

  Rather than waiting for a reply, Ogama sent several landing craft filled with troops to Lassul Bay and nearby beaches over the next two days, taking numerous Australians by surprise. Captain David C. Hutchinson-Smith of the 17th Antitank Battery, whose small party fled from Harvey’s plantation into the jungle, later described the struggle the Australians faced.

  The Japanese had covered the distance between the beach and the plantation in a remarkably short time and opened up with mortar, light machine gun and small arms fire. My small group was soon sheltering in a donga and derived the maximum psychological and minimum physical protection from the leafy branches of a diminutive coffee tree.

  At about dusk, contact was made with another small party and it was decided to have a scratch meal and camp till morning …

  We had not been seated in a tiny clearing for more than 20 minutes when a surly, insolent Kanaka “boy” came through the gloom and handed me a note.* It was to the effect that he had been instructed to state that if we gave ourselves up our lives would be guaranteed, that the Japanese knew where we were, and that if we did not surrender, all troops in the area would be killed. That they did know our whereabouts was evidenced by the fact that the “boy” had delivered the note, and we were thus faced with a problem which was one for individual decision.

  Hutchinson-Smith pondered his choices only briefly. His group possessed just enough food for one or two “very scanty” meals, and none of his men had the strength to walk more than a few miles. Thus, he and two enlisted men followed the native back towar
d the plantation. They were taken prisoner and escorted to the main house, where approximately sixty other captured Australians were already sitting on the lawn. The prisoners were somewhat surprised to be served a meal of steamed rice, bully beef, and canned beets—more food than they’d seen in weeks.

  But their gratification, recalled Hutchinson-Smith, was tempered by the sight of a local half-German individual who was helping the Japanese. “[Joseph] Rokker was ingratiating himself with the Japs and was overbearing and insolent in his attitude to us. He had always been surly when he held the contract for the supply of firewood to Malaguna Camp before the attack, and from his frequent visits to the camp he was probably in a position to give quite a deal of information to the Japanese on local military matters.”

  That night, the captives were ferried out to the Duranbah, a large copra vessel. The next day it moved slowly toward Rabaul, stopping at several points along the way to pick up more prisoners. Ogama’s dragnet had captured approximately 160 soldiers, including four officers of the 17th Antitank Battery and four from the 2/22nd Battalion. Delivered to Rabaul in the Duranbah, they found themselves back in their former camp on Malaguna Road. “And so,” added Hutchinson-Smith, “the prodigal sons returned to the fold.”

  Evidently satisfied with bagging such a large number of prisoners, Ogama discontinued the pursuit and sent his troops back to their encampment near the Keravat. However, with a little more effort they could have captured twice as many Australians. Trapped between the mountains and the sea, Pip Appel and nearly two hundred others were critically low on food. They were separated into several groups, each of which faced conditions that grew ever more intolerable.